SIR PAUL MARSHALL, the hedge-funder manager and co-owner of GB News who sits on the board of HTB’s Church Revitalisation Trust has deleted all of his posts on the social-media site X (formerly Twitter) after an investigation highlighted that he had liked and retweeted anti-Muslim tweets.
The investigation, carried out by Hope not Hate — a charity that opposes far-right extremism — was published this week and broadcast by The News Agents podcast. It reported that last 12 months Sir Paul had modified his X username to @areopagus123, which “matches that of an organization arrange by Marshall in 2021, Areopagus Ventures, and which seems to derive from Marshall’s interest in Areopagitica, John Milton’s polemic in defence of free speech”.
One post “liked” by the account read: “It is only a matter of time before civil war starts in Europe. The native European population is losing patience with the fake refugee invaders.” Another read: “If we would like European civilization to survive we’d like to not only close the borders but start mass expulsions immediately. We don’t stand a likelihood unless we start that process very soon.”
The account had “liked” quite a lot of posts from an account called Worldbywolf, certainly one of which warned that “There has never been a rustic that has remained peaceful with a sizeable Islamic presence. . . Once the Muslims get to 15-20% of the population the present cold civil war will turn hot.”
The account retweeted a post from Amy Mek which warned of “The 4 stages of Islamic conquest”, stating that Muslim immigration was a type of “infiltration” that will result in “the establishment of a totalitarian Islamic theocracy”.
Another post retweeted referred to “Pascal’s wager within the twenty first century”: “God may or might not be real, but the opposite side is so passionate, so committed to worshipping Satan, evil, homosexuality and corrupting children, that even when god wasn’t real, believing in him to fend these demons off is preferable.”
Hope not Hate reported that, after approaching Sir Paul for comment, all of his tweets and almost 300 likes were faraway from the account. An announcement said: “Paul Marshall’s account is private but is nonetheless followed by 5000 people including many journalists. He posts on a wide range of subjects and people cited represent a small and unrepresentative sample of over 5000 posts. This sample doesn’t represent his views.
“As most X/Twitter users know, it may possibly be a fountain of ideas, but a few of it’s of uncertain quality and all his posts have now been deleted to avoid any further misunderstanding.”
Sir Paul is the founder, chief investment officer, and chairman of Marshall Wace LLP, certainly one of Europe’s leading hedge fund groups. The Sunday Times Rich List has estimated that he has a fortune of £800 million.
He is the founder and owner of Unherd Media, which seeks to “keep off against the herd mentality with latest and daring considering” — including amongst its columnists Canon Giles Fraser — and a co-owner of GB News, established in 2021 and residential to presenters that include Nigel Farage and, until recently, the Revd Calvin Robinson (News, 27 May 2022). He is known to be preparing a bid to purchase The Telegraph and The Spectator.
Once a Liberal Democrat candidate and donor, he shifted his loyalty to the Conservative Party in 2016, becoming a distinguished donor to the Leave campaign within the Brexit referendum.
The focus of his philanthropy has been education. He is a founding trustee of Ark, the youngsters’s charity, and chairman of Ark Schools, which manages 39 primary and secondary academies across England, mainly in areas of economic drawback.
Sir Paul has worshipped at Holy Trinity, Brompton, since 1997, and was a member of the board of St Paul’s Theological Centre, certainly one of the founding partners of St Mellitus, for which he’s a donor. Today, he sits on the board of the Church Revitalisation Trust (CRT), incorporated as a charity in 2017 “to further the church planting activity which was previously undertaken by Holy Trinity Brompton” (Features, 21 April 2017). Within its network are greater than 100 congregations, plus 30 larger resource churches.
Under the Church of England’s Strategic Development Programme, thousands and thousands of kilos were allocated by the Church Commissioners to fund plants within the network. An independent review of SDF recorded that 14 per cent of all funds had gone to projects exclusively run by Revitalise (Church Revitalisation) Trust (CRT), and an additional 29 per cent to projects by which CRT was involved together with churches of other traditions (News, 10 November, 2023).
The partnership is predicted to proceed under the brand new stream of Commissioners’ funding: Strategic Mission and Ministry Investment. Last 12 months, the diocese of Manchester reported that a £3.6-million grant would go towards a “major latest church” situated in the town centre of Manchester, in partnership with the Church Revitalisation Trust (News, 31 March 2023).
The CRT also runs quite a lot of programmes connected to ministerial formation within the Church of England: the Peter Stream, which seeks to support people from under-represented groups within the discernment process (across racial, social and academic lines) and the Caleb Stream, a one-year pathway to ordination for “mature and experienced leaders”. It also runs Accelerate, a programme for final-year curates preparing to plant or revitalise a church within the HTB Network.
Another strand of its work is “Love Your Neighbour”, an initiative launched in the course of the Covid-19 pandemic that seeks to “equip churches to be at the vanguard of social transformation of their local area” (News, 10 July 2020).
It was confirmed on Friday that Sir Paul is a donor to the Centre for Cultural Witness, the initiative arrange at Lambeth Palace to speak the Church’s “profound and reworking” story to the general public (News, 18 February 2022), and which runs the Seen and Unseen blog.
Sir Paul is a key figure in Conservative Christian circles within the UK. He launched Unherd in 2017 in partnership with Tim Montgomerie, a founding father of the Conservative Christian Fellowship. The other major shareholder in GB News is Christopher Chandler, a Christian New Zealander businessman who funds the Legatum Institute, a libertarian thinktank. The former chief executive of Legatum is Baroness Philipa Stroud, who sits alongside Sir Paul on the advisory board of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (News, 17 November 2023), a charity with an ambition to “draw on our moral, cultural, economic and spiritual foundations to assume a future where empowered residents take responsibility and work together to bring flourishing and prosperity to their homes, communities, and beyond.”
In a recent essay for the Alliance, Sir Paul wrote: “Sometimes it appears like our civilisation is intent on forgetting the virtues upon which it’s founded: Every human soul is sacred; We should love our neighbours as ourselves; With rights come responsibilities; With privilege, comes duty.” The answer to contemporary challenges could possibly be found, he wrote, “with ourselves, in human ingenuity and innovation, within the extraordinary creativity of free markets, within the free association of like-minded people”.
He received his knighthood in 2016 for services to education and philanthropy. Founded with one school in 2006, Ark has a track record of improving leads to struggling schools that join its network. In 2020, it reported that 42 per cent of its pupils were eligible for the Pupil Premium Grant, in comparison with a national average of 25 per cent, while 82 per cent of sixth-formers gained a higher-education place, compared with a national average of 59 per cent. Many of its schools are based in areas with large UK Minority Ethnic populations, including Ark Boulton Academy in Sparkhill, an area of Birmingham with a majority Muslim population.
In 2021, Sir Paul’s son, Winston Marshall, left the band Mumford and Sons after a web-based backlash to a tweet by which he praised a book by Andy Ngo, Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s radical plan to destroy democracy. In a blog post, Winston Marshall wrote: “I could remain and proceed to self-censor but it would erode my sense of integrity.”
The Church Times approached Sir Paul for comment.
